In article <pan.2004.08.26.07.40.17.359280.1495@lcpc.fr>, Bernard wrote:
>A friend of mine has RedHat 7.0 installed on his machine ; he would like
>to upgrade to 7.2. If merely re-installing, he would lose a lot of config
>, so he just want to upgrade.

Probably going to be more trouble than it's worth. RH7.0 was a 2.2.x kernel
running on glibc-2.1.93 (which was an unoffical version released only by
Red Hat and had compatibility problems), while 7.2 was a 2.4.x kernel,
running on glibc2.2.4 nevermind all of the desktop changes.

The other problem is that your friend is obviously not making an effor to
keep the systems up to date. RH7.0 came out in September 2000, and support
for it was ended in April 2003. Even 7.2 which came out in October 2001 has
been unsupported since last year.

>Where can I download such an upgrade package, now that RedHat no longer
>maintains old distros ?

I suppose you could check to see if www.linuxiso.org still has it. If not,
try the used book stores and see if you can find an older book with GPL
CDs. As Nico Kadel-Garcia mentions, "upgrade" has been an option in place
of "install" on RH for years - I recall being offered that option with
3.0.3 in 1996. Given that, I'd strongly recommend going to something
up to date, like Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. The procedure is
covered in the installation manual.

Also, I've never been happy doing an "upgrade", as it's a lot more of
a mess than doing a full backup (or two) of your current setup, then
wiping the install and putting in a clean install of the new stuff. You can
then go to your backups, and retrieve the files you may specifically need
and translating them to the current setup. (Often, when jumping so many
versions, even configuration files will no longer be compatible.)

Old guy